My roommate grew up on a farm in rural Washington with six older brothers whose hobbies ranged from plumbing to bartending to backyard Camaro repair. As she was a shy, scholarly type, her parents and brothers had taken great pains to shield her from the more unsavory bits of farm life, which meant she was well qualified for college but as prepared for abandonment in the wilderness as I was, which is to say not at all.
Our first reaction to the vanished vans was based on careful consideration of the situation and coolheaded assessment of our options: We screamed. After getting that step out of the way we cycled through several Kubler-Rossian stages of panic:
- Running up and down the gravel road to see if our colleagues were playing a prank on us by parking just around the bend (they weren’t).
- Walking cautiously back toward the outskirts of the fishing camp to see if Marlborough Man or any of his friends were around (they weren’t).
- Running back up the road to check again to see if our colleagues were playing a prank on us (they still weren’t).
Finally, the panic exhausted out of my system like a purple-faced toddler inhaling noisily when it’s evident that mother is not going to cough up a cookie. It was time to take stock and actually come up with a plan. What would my study pioneer ancestors have done? After all, they had mined gold in Colorado in the 1880s and in Alaska in the 1900s, opened a dry-goods store Vancouver, BC when it was nothing but a tiny railhead in the wilderness, and helped build the giant Fort Peck Dam in eastern Montana during the Great Depression. I suddenly felt a weight of responsibility not to be an embarrassment. However, as we rummaged through our meager belongings, it occurred to me that my ancestors had probably never found themselves in the bottom of a sagebrush canyon wearing t-shirts, shorts and flip-flops, equipped only with half a peanut butter sandwich, an empty bottle of bug spray and a lipstick. I suppose if they had, they would have figured out a way to fashion these items into a signal flare or a some such thing, but I was evidently sitting in the back of the class leafing through Vogue when those lessons were being taught.
At any rate, we decided to buck up and get ourselves out of this situation. Our first idea was to try to spend the night where we were. I dimly recalled from third-grade Bluebirds camp that one was not supposed to wander about when lost in the wilderness as searchers would look first where one was last seen. But the light was disappearing fast, and we had nothing resembling a shelter available to us. My roommate suggested spending the night in the porta-potties, but then nixed the idea when a careful assessment of the floor plan revealed that the only way to do so was to cuddle up in a fetal position around the toilet itself, an arrangement unknown even in most Times Square hotels. I then hit upon the bright idea of spending the night in a large culvert across the road from the potties, but the ominous dribble of foul-smelling water in the bottom of the giant drainage pipe did not bode well. And there might be spiders.
Our second idea was to hike out on the gravel road to the nearest town, about eight miles away. This plan went like clockwork for about a quarter of a mile, until we realized we were alone in a vast, empty landscape of lava boulders, tumbleweeds and dust, lit only by an immense black sky thick with stars. Were those footsteps behind us? Shhh!!! What was that rustling by the side of the road? Trying not to run so fast that we would trip and fall on the washboard road, we beat a hasty retreat back to our starting point.
When we arrived, out of breath, we saw twinkling propane lantern lights at the fishing camp. Marlboro Man and a few others were drinking beer, filleting the day’s steelhead catch, and poking up the coals in the campfire rings.
Emboldened by the adrenaline-fueled rush back to the campsite, I grabbed my roommate by the elbow and frog-marched her with me toward the nearest fisherman. “Look pathetic” I advised her unnecessarily. Smoothing the grit out of my hair as best I could, I shambled up to Marlboro Man, who barely looked up from cooler in which he was arranging a layer of bloody filets. “Umm, we were left behind on a rafting trip today…” I croaked. Marlboro Man’s cigarette shifted slightly in his mouth. “Umm, could you possibly give us a ride to Maupin so we could call someone?” Marlboro Man studied us carefully through a nimbus of blue-ish smoke, taking careful note of our bedraggled clothes, meager possessions and the goosebumps that were starting to appear on our bare arms and legs as the evening deepened into night.
“No,” he said, and turned back to the filets.
To be continued…
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